A few folks had wondered whether the partnership announcement earlier this week between Google (GOOG) and Salesforce.com (CRM) was a prelude to Google acquiring Salesforce; after all, both companies are taking on Microsoft (MSFT) in their mission to move business software onto the Web. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff did nothing to quell such speculation earlier this week during the partnership announcement.
Throughout the lunch event, where Benioff appeared on stage at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel with Google sales vice president Sheryl Sandberg, he waxed poetic about how the two companies are made for each other. He used the term “mind meld” to describe how well their developers worked together, and talked about how he had influenced Google’s corporate philanthropy model – an interesting side story that was only peripherally related to the day’s announcement of AdWords integration into Salesforce, and could be used to make the case that these two corporate lovebirds belong together.
In the exclusive video below, note how Benioff casually refers to his relationship with Google as a “marriage,” and how he notes that there’s no other company Salesforce would get this cozy with. (Apologies for the fact that the video looks as if it were shot at the gates of Hades; the red lighting effects at the Salesforce/Google announcement are the reason why.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBi4dns3pi0]